Sub-Basement Twelve smelled of stone-hard sheepskin, rancid bone glue, and three hundred years of undisturbed fungal rot.
It was an abandoned bindery tucked beneath the limestone underbelly of the Bookbinders’ Quarter, forgotten by the town exam guards since the Great Fire of the Fourth Epoch. Half-rotted oak pressing benches lined the weeping shale walls, their huge cast-iron screw-presses rusted into permanent, gargoyle-like grimaces. Above their heads, ancient cedar floor beams groaned under the huge weight of ten million volumes stored in the vaults above, weeping slow, steady drops of stone-heavy lime water into fractured clay basins.
Ren Vale knelt beside an upturned book-crate, his knees grinding into hundreds of years of dry leather shavings.
In his right hand, he held a piece of charred willow charcoal he had scavenged from a cold forge in the hall. He had laid out a scrap of clean, gray butcher’s paper across the crate and was attempting to sketch the layout of Sub-Basement Nine. He marked the positions of Proctor Danvers’s desk, the main stairwell, and the air-powered junction boxes.
He reached the third line of his notes, writing a brief contractual summary of the palimpsest he had uncovered on Charter 409-B.
THWACK.
A flat slab of polished black dark rock slammed down directly across his butcher’s paper, extinguishing his charcoal sketch under two inches of solid fiery stone.
